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December 21, 2008

Comments

Brad

Good catch! Thanks!

James Pritchard

Towards the end of the first section the text reads: "Lewis was ten years younger than Lewis, and it would seem they had real affinities." It surely should be "Lewis was ten years younger than Eliot,...".

Excellent piece in other respects.

Don Petesen

Wonderful to read of the relationship between Lewis and Eliot. One of my poet/Christian questions has for a long time concerned Tom's friend Ezra. It seems to me when Ezra replaced Confucius with Agassiz, and recommended to us that we read Tom's book on heresy, After Strange Gods, and went deeply into a decade of contrition, that Ezra was in fact returning to his Christian beginnings. It is also important to me to note that Wallace Stevens turned to Christianity at the end of his life. Tom, Ez, and Wally! Yea!

Timothy G May


Thank you,

I found this very interesting as I'm currently completing a masters dissertation on T. S. Eliot. (due a week tomorrow!!!)I wish I'd come across the Dale book earlier, it looks like a good read. Sadly I cannot find a single copy in Britain (I study at the University of Edinburgh)

It would have been delightful to have witnessed Eliot and Lewis conversing, you rightfully point out just how much they had in common. It is a shame they they didn't figure that out sooner.

Woolf did indeed despise Eliot for his conversion. However, Peter Ackroyd, in his seminal biography points out how much she noticed a change for the better in his personality and demeanour, remarking how he had "acquired more self-confidence and authority." It seems from this and other private comments she actually quite admired him for his conviction, even if she no longer admired his work and publicly renounced him.


Tim Hilderbrand

P.S.

Virgina Woolf's comments about T.S. make me chuckle, when I think of the play whose title incorporates her name...

:)

Tim Hilderbrand

I'm not entirely sure Ignatieff is as far away from that tradition as seems to be the case. When Canadian politics began swirling into the vortex of "the coalition", I felt deeply a) that there were dark spiritual forces at play, and b) compelled to pray that Michael would rise, and through him some sanity back to the opposition benches...not that either side was blameless, obviously. I shared my feelings with the National House of Prayer, who were similarly moved. I don't know much about Ignatieff, but I found it all intriguing. I'm a conservative voter usually.

I also found this article intriguing, because the success of some people in hindsight often replaces our memory or knowledge of the suffering and scorn they endured while achieving it. Like Winston Churchill, for instance...I had no idea how universally loathed and ridiculed he was until I did a theatre history assignment, and picked up 10 months of newspapers on micrcofiche from the years before World War 2, to study theatre criticism in that period. It was astonishing. Really, really dark and hateful. Perhaps not seen the same way in the western world until recently, in the united states. I had no knowledge that T.S. Elliot endured what he did. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me, but it always does. :) Still, it gives me pause when I see people piling onto a politician...be it "the murderer" Bush, or "the anti-Christ" Obama. What forces are we being puppeted by?

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